There were always slave ministers of the
gospel who performed marriage ceremonies in the slave community. None of
these were considered legal contracts by the slaveholding population, but they
were certainly considered moral and spiritual contracts by the participants.
Because there was no statutory law recognizing marriage between slaves, one must
look to the common law. At common law, it is the declared assent of the
mind to the act of marriage which makes it legal. By the end of the Civil War, former slaves
were in destitute conditions and the South was in shambles. Many Southern
states had to rewrite their state constitutions to make them comply with the
Constitution of the United States, and all of them had to pass new laws, acts,
and codes to reflect the new status of over 4 million men, women and children
who had been enslaved for generations, but were now free. One area needing
immediate attention was the recognition and legalization of those marriages which
had been contracted during slavery according to the customs of the slave
community. Although the couples may have considered themselves morally
married, as they were under common law, the states sought ways to ratify these
alliances. In North Carolina, as well as in other confederate states,
slave marriages performed by regular civil or religious authorities had been
absolutely forbidden by law. In North Carolina, the General Assembly in 1866 passed An
Act Concerning Negroes and Persons of Color or of Mixed Blood. This
Act contained 19 sections. Section 1 defined "persons of color".
Section 5 decreed that those persons whose cohabitation was to be ratified into
a state of marriage were required to appear before the local Clerk of County
Court or Justice of the Peace to acknowledge that fact. Section 6
described the penalty for failure to do so before Sept. 1, 1866. Those
acknowledgements were to be recorded and regarded as proof that a marriage had
existed. Section 6 resulted in the vast majority of the couples reporting
their marriages between March and September, 1866. Only 71 records of cohabitation have
survived in Currituck County. The justices gave very few surnames for the
wives. Click on the husband's name for a look at an image of the marriage.

Permission to post the above marriages was kindly given by Barnetta McGhee
White, Ph.D, who compiled a wonderful 3-volume book, Somebody Knows My Name, on
marriages of freed people in the state of North Carolina. Images were scanned and submitted by Ben Bateman, Jr.